1969: Stories Into Music

THE EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF LIFE WRITING VOLUME III(2014)C60–C70 1969: Stories into Music Andrew Kupfer [email protected] In the winter of 1969, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German composer and electronic music pioneer, and John Lennon, then still of the Beatles, agreed to meet in New York City to plan a joint concert of their music. The pairing seemed unlikely, but in fact the two admired each other’s work, with the Beatles putting Stockhausen’s photo on the cover of their Sgt. Pepper’s album and Stockhausen calling Lennon the century’s most important mediator between popular and serious music. Over time the two men had struck up a correspondence and, according to Stockhausen, frequently spoke on the telephone. But on the appointed day, New York was struck by a deadly blizzard. Stockhausen showed up at the meeting Luciano Berio, John Lennon, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (on-screen during a performance of 1969 at Carnegie Hall) courted scorn with compositions reflecting their political beliefs. (Photo by Hiroyuki Ito for the New York Times.) European Journal of Life Writing, Vol III, C60–C70 2014. doi: 10.5463/ejlw.3.120 1969 : Stories into music 61 place; Lennon, assuming no one in his right mind would travel in the storm, did not. The two would never meet. Four decades later, the missed connection would become the germ of 1969, a concert-theater piece about music and politics in the 1960s, and about how in pushing against social and artistic convention, composers would come to write their life stories in their work. At first glance, the storytelling nature of their music is easier to imagine for someone like Lennon. We take for granted that personal history seeps into popular songs; indeed, we will sift the lyrics for clues to the songwriters’ lives. But autobiography can inform even the most astringent compositions of the 20th century classical avant-garde. In conceiving the show, we chose a form that would coax out the con- nections between life and work. Co-created and staged by the new-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, 1969 is a multimedia piece, with dialogue voiced over live and recorded music as archival video and photographs are projected onscreen. The words are those of the composers whose music we feature – Stockhausen, Lennon, Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, Luciano Berio, and Leonard Bernstein – and of others in their circle, includ- ing politicians, critics, and colleagues, with text drawn from writings, speeches, newspaper articles, biographical accounts, record covers, inter- views, and letters. Woven together, these strands become scenes showing how musicians from each side of the classical/popular music divide influ- enced one another and struggled to define the responsibility of the artist in an era of political calamity. The Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the election of Richard Nixon were all events that would inspire the composers’ art and would some- times be their prime motivation. The music is inseparable from personal history, partly a creature of outrage, partly the confessional. These works are also the creations of musicians who changed by stray- ing from their accustomed forms, often in tandem with upheavals in their lives. Berio made his own arrangements of some of the Beatles’ songs; Bernstein incorporated elements of rock music and jazz in his scores; the Beatles adopted the tape loops and electronic bleeps and distortions of the classical avant-garde; Stockhausen pushed beyond strictly defined melody, structure, and meter in his compositions and introduced chance in their performance. 1969 ’s creators and performers got to share in the newness and discom- fort, which in a way helped underline the show’s transformational themes. My job with the show was scriptwriter. As a journalist, I was comfortable with gathering material and synthesizing a story from it, but the constraint of using found language was a new challenge, obliging me to tell the story with unavoidable gaps in the text. But those disjunctions, along with the 62 Andrew Kupfer layering of media, forced the audience to make interpretive leaps that immersed them in the creative froth of the composers and the real-life drama that flowed into the music. The staging of the show brings home the message, too. Professional actors play only three of the many characters. Most of the dialogue is spoken, from memory, by the 20 members of the ensemble – classically trained musicians with no acting experience. Yet much of the power of the performance comes from the fact that the voices of the characters emerge from the orchestra; that is, the stories of the protagonists come, quite literally, from the music. So just as the lives of the composers became part of their work, so does the telling of how they told their stories. * * * The putative meeting between Lennon and Stockhausen turned out to be a perfect metaphor for the 1960s, with the decade’s brew of idealism, loss, and missed opportunities, and we used it as a leitmotif. The performance begins with the two men presenting slide shows of their lives, revealing at the outset that their personal histories would be the tale they would tell as musicians. The similarities between the two were strik- ing. Both had been left by their mothers, Lennon’s giving him up to the care of an aunt, Stockhausen’s descending into mental illness and end- ing up in an asylum; both mothers were killed when their sons were still young, Lennon’s run down by a drunk driver, Stockhausen’s, as he would Stockhausen (here recording “Friday” from Licht in his studio in 1994) blended electronic and acoustic music. (Photo by Kathinka Pasveer.) 1969 : Stories into music 63 later put it, “euthanized by the Nazis as a useless eater.” Both men would go on to have complicated romantic lives, Stockhausen having a long domestic arrangement with two women simultaneously and Yoko Ono instigating a liaison between Lennon and her personal assistant. Both also found inspiration for their work in personal crises and political beliefs, and were pilloried for it. Stockhausen conceived his choral work Stimmung (“tuning”) after he came home one day to discover that his wife had left him. He vowed that he would starve himself to death. On his fourth day without food, he opened the piano and played a single note; it was, he said, like the first note of his entire life, and he decided to keep on living. He called his greatest composition from the period – Hymnen (“anthems”) – “a music of all countries” for a time of global strife. Hymnen was a groundbreaking work, remarkable for its sweep and novelty, audaciously combining recorded and live elements. But the piece was greeted with harsh reviews – “simplistic and naive,” declared a New York Times reviewer, an impenetrable mélange of “fractured phrases” – and at least some of the scorn seemed related to the sort of people attending the premiere: “The most interesting thing about the Stock- hausen program was the audience,” wrote another Times critic. “There was long hair; there were miniskirts and hot pants; there were bearded boys in sweaters and denims; there was even a suspicious odor that sort of resembled tobacco.” Lennon and Yoko Ono are recording “Give Peace a Chance” at a 1969 bed-in in Montreal. At center foreground is psychologist and LSD enthusiast Timothy Leary. (Photo by Roy Kerwood.) 64 Andrew Kupfer At around the same time, in one of the first examples of celebrity activism, Lennon and Yoko Ono took advantage of their place in the spotlight to campaign for peace, staging “bed-ins,” in which they invited the press to observe them lying in bed surrounded by political placards as they spoke about the Vietnam War. They also appeared on television shrouded in giant bags, symbolizing facelessness. It was then that they released Unfin- ished Music, an experimental album for which Ono was the driving force. While created in the spirit of making new sounds, Unfinished Music helped Lennon underscore his break with the Beatles, and the album was very much intertwined with the romance between its creators. The couple recorded the music alone, in one night, and, Lennon said, they became lovers as the sun rose, “right there in that little studio.” The record cover showed them standing side-by-side, nude, photographed head-on for the front of the album and from the rear for the back. Unfinished Music was a wildly discordant mix of acoustic and electronic sounds and yowling vocals. The reviews were withering. “An ego trip of two rich waifs,” wrote a critic in Rolling Stone, “equaled by precocious teenagers with tape record- ers everywhere.” Leonard Bernstein’s career followed a similar arc of struggle, suc- cess, and reversal. As a child, he had a difficult relationship with his father, a businessman, who hated the idea that his son might become a The election of Richard Nixon, pictured here at his inauguration, was a flashpoint for artists. (Photo by Alarm Will Sound.) 1969 : Stories into music 65 musician. But Bernstein learned to play the piano by ear on an instru- ment given to the family by an aunt, and he raised money for formal studies by giving lessons to neighborhood children. He proved to be a musical Renaissance man, gifted as composer, conductor, and pianist. As conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein was a champion of Stockhausen and Berio, premiering important works of both composers, and he lived in the same Manhattan apartment building as Lennon; he had the Beatles in mind when he declared the popular music of the 1960s to be “more adventurous than anything being written in serious music today.” Leonard Bernstein (left) and his wife Felicia, with Black Panther Field Marshal Don Cox, hosted a party in 1970 to raise legal funds for the Panthers.

Load more